Spending My Retirement In A Game

But in order to be able to properly supply everything that was needed for those engravings, such as special properties, abilities, and effects, Eisen had to create a unique alloy. It was going to use a number of different metals, gemstones, and even some herbs.

On top of that, the recipe apparently included the horns and blood of some specific monsters, which were apparently some of the hardest to procure due to the specific species and rank that were required.

As the metal parts were being prepared, Eisen got started with the rest of the first phase's materials. For now, that included the grinding down of spatial stones, rank 6 giant stag antlers, the carapace of a rank 3 wood beetle, as well as the distilling of troll-blood and the liquid from blue-ink mushrooms.

The powder from the giant stag antlers and the wood beetle carapace was mixed together with the distilled liquid from the blue-ink mushroom, left to soak it in for a few minutes.

In the meantime, the distilled troll-blood was put aside for later, and the dried-out powder left behind from that blood was scooped up and mixed in with the spatial stone powder. At that point, the gold fully melted, and Eisen liquified it further with transmutation.

With a swift circular motion, he created a small whirlpool in the molten metal's center, and quickly poured in the dried-blood and spatial stone mixture. Almost instantly, the glowing gold took on a blue hue. For a little while longer, Eisen continued to stir, supplying a constant stream of mana to it. Soon, the gold turned from that blue, over to purple, to red, and then a pale pink.

At that point, Eisen immediately poured the metal out into a thin layer onto a sheet to make it dry quickly, but naturally without using oil or water, and then moved on.

The mixture of the antler and carapace powders had soaked up the blue-ink mushroom's liquid, and Eisen quickly started to mix it together further with his hands, as if he was trying to work with dough. Once the constistency slightly changed to something gooey and sticky, turning into a smooth mass, Eisen grabbed the crucible with the molten iron and poured it onto the pile of goo.

After taking a deep breath, Eisen began to fold the goo and molten iron over each other, mixing them together by hand as it cooled down rapidly. Of course, the released steam shot straight into Eisen's face, but the part he was more focused on was the hot pain from the metal. Eisen could deal with the heat on his hands, but only to a certain degree.

While he didn't take any particular damage from it, the pain was still there, making his hands sting deeply. Though, still manageable at the end of the day.

By the time the goo and iron mixture cooled down, the goo was fully mixed into it, and Eisen once more heated it all up. In the meantime, he started hammering down the zinc into a thin sheet, at which point he folded it around the iron mixture like a shell. Once more, Eisen hammered it into a thin sheet, folding it over itself and hammering it down again.

He did this multiple times until thousands of different layers pressed onto each other. Then, once it was at the amount of layers that Eisen needed, he hammered it into the size of a regular ingot, and brought it over to the bowl filled with the distilled troll-blood, quenching the metal inside of it, and then pulled it back out.

At that point, the silver was fully liquified and had the required quantity of water mana within it. Eisen poured it into a cauldron and began to boil this liquid metal. Of course, since it wasn't molten metal, but simply magically liquified, it soon began to boil. And into that boiling silver, Eisen placed the pale pink gold and the iron-zinc ingot.

Since he was dealing with liquified metal, the boiling temperature was at a much higher point than normal; higher than what it would take for a regular cauldron to melt, so it was made of Eisen's own magic to prevent this. Before long, the boiling silver slowly melted down the two different metals.

Due to the special treatment they had undergone, they took on unique properties that they usually wouldn't have, which were now being released into the silver, mixing with each other through the magical metal's special influence.

By the time that everything had fully mixed together, Eisen poured the mixture out into an ingot-mold, separated into the exact volumes that he needed to more easily use this mixture for the next step. Because, of course, this was just the first of many.

Not just the sheer volume of the materials that Eisen had to transform into this new material was overwhelming, but the variety was probably even more intimidating.

A lot of materials had to be matured under specific circumstances, others had to be dryed or even fermented. One step of the process required Eisen to mix high-carbon steel with some other materials to make it rot; not rust, but actually rot. That rotten steel would then be fertilizer for the seeds of a specific herb, which Eisen then had to cross-breed with a nut.

The tree growing from that cross-breed would then be harvested and that wood dried out, before being used for the next step.

A lot of these processes were just there to cause minor, very specific effects that had to come together as a whole in a specific ways. It was a little like writing a dozen books just to take a single word from each of them to form a sentence, which was then again the definition for the final term, which was a made-up word in a language that didn't exist.

It was nonsensical, really, and overly complicated, but that was what this high-level alchemy was generally like. Especially when combined with metallurgy and magic, alchemy was something that often took weeks or months of preparation. Of course, Eisen didn't have that preparation, but still.

Of course, the real recipe for this material was probably a bit different; more streamlined and faster for the former Eisen. But since Xenia had to figure things out just by analyzing the metal, she had to figure out a way to get that result with the knowledge she currently had.

From what Eisen knew, it definitely all felt right, which was more than just a good sign that they were on the right track. Maybe at some point Eisen and Xenia would remember some details that could improve the process, but until then, this complicated conconction of techniques was the only way they could get what they needed.

But obviously, that was exactly why Eisen had to go through this process a couple times, to make sure that he got accustomed to it before working on everything later on, at a completely different scale of operation.

But for the time being, Eisen had to take a break. Parc and Rouge were approaching, and Eisen had to focus on teaching them as well. The materials for the next step would take a little bit of time to prepare anyway.

And since there were a lot of infusion-based things for this step, there wasn't much that Eisen could actively do, so using that time to walk Parc and Rouge through some things would help as well.

He could actually try and walk them through some of these steps; since they were learning about the way that higher-rank materials worked, talking about why differently ranked materials interacted with each other the way they did would potentially give them a deeper understanding of what it was they were dealing with.